Diebert van Rhijn wrote:No, you just made that up. Interesting move. But I'll say it again:
Fascism is
fascination with power but also
denial of how power actually works which is one of the factors which can lead to the excessive fascination if circumstance allow; it's
ignorance in a coconut shell. Here are some condensed parts of what was
actually written.
Victor wrote:1) I am not interested in strength or power. i am interested in wholeness ....2) My drive and control are directed inwards......I score near the bottom on authoritarianism and social domination scales....
I have absolutely no interest in controlling, or exerting power over, you or anyone else. My ability to exert power outwards, whatever its magnitude, is purely a side effect of what I am; a fringe benefit,
Diebert wrote: ...Your stressing that you do not desire to control anyone, even are abhorred by the idea, is suspect in itself..... you're continuously exerting power over others or being dominated and manipulated.....
That last excerpt is interesting. let's see its context:
you seem to believe in some synergistic web where nothing stands or acts alone and equilibria of power seeking agents are established. From this perspective you're continuously exerting power over others or being dominated and manipulated.
So you ascribe a power-centric view to me --
wrongly (I don't believe the web of relations to be defined by power equilibria, unlike you) -- and then you accuse me of fixating on power, when in fact it's only your own power fixation which you reveal and then project onto me.
You see, I suspect your lack of interest and concern, your degradation as side-effect of power relations, no matter if you're exerting it or the power is exerted over you, point in my view to a misunderstanding of power itself if not merely some contrived masquerading act.
of course. According to you, all relations
are power relations, that is their essential nature apparently ('
Power is the package') -- of course this is a self-evident philosophical truth to you, yessireebob! -- and if I disagree with you, this merely means that I am a fascist
and naively ignorant about power.
You are like an autistic kid who insists that all physical laws
are the package, that relations are defined by physical laws. So they are... but that's just a small part of the story, and your fixation, your exclusion of all other relation aspects besides power, says more about you than about me.
Every human relation has a physics aspect, a physical (in colloquial sense) aspect, a sociological, psychological, economic, epistemic, etc. aspects -- and yeah, the power aspect too. You
choose what to focus on. You set your priorities. Well, you chose your priority (power uber alles!) apparently without recognizing that this was optional, that you had many alternatives available. How sadly amusing... you mistake your subconscious fears and cravings for reality.
While your holistic ideas sound fine and dandy, the sum of your forum behavior, geeky past and current political views made me think you do not understand power at all and your claimed disinterest would be only a facade, a smoke screen of ignorance.
No, kiddo, you simply assume that understanding power must come with a certain attitude (and BTW you know basically nothing about my current political views, other than the fact that i am a zionist). I could venture a guess about what that attitude is, bit I shall refrain from doing so for now. Your view is apparently that since my behavior doesn't conform with how you think someone ought to act if they understand this matter, then I must be all sorts of nasty things. This was BTW why i asked you if you read "Watchmen" -- it has an incredibly interesting and subtle tangent on the relationship between power and knowledge (and wisdom).
As I said earlier, unapologetic wholeness scares you people. You can't deal with the rejection of your neurotic love-hate relationship with power, the attitude which neither covets power nor flees from it. :)
I suspect your underlying drive here is self-loathing. You crave power yet recoil from it, recoil from that craving, and so you see the world in terms of power, assume this perception to be reality, project it onto others, and then castigate them for supposedly fixating on power -- when in fact it's your own obsession you are excoriating, your own fixation you are trying to exorcise.
Your neuroticism must be a one helluva bitch. :)
Your very passion for knowledge and teaching is just one example of exerting power. Which is not bad at all unless you think you're being jolly Santa Claus while doing it. Then you're just kidding yourself, "forever kiddo" :)
You of course missed it, but I had stated many times that I don't see myself as a 'good guy', nor do I see myself as a teacher. In fact, seeing myself as a 'good person', a teacher and a giver, was one of the very first illusions I let go of, which I had alluded to in the recent past.
Like ability to exert power, teaching is wholly incidental to what I am. that's why I make absolutely no effort to
influence people into accepting my statements, except for the fact of making the statements itself. I have had multiple people 'advise' me that I could teach better if I were willing to be more manipulative -- excuse me, nicer and less abrasive -- and to them I always say that teaching is not my goal. Learn from me, or not, it's your business, not mine. You cannot serve two masters, so to speak, and
knowledge, not teaching, is my first choice (power doesn't even make it into the top 3).
Yours, apparently, is
power, and you hate yourself for it, even as you fail to recognize that it's a
choice, only one of many options, and not the objectively essential nature of the world. :)